


Tell Her Later

by ProblematicPines



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bargaining, Bill Cipher Being Bill Cipher, Canon Divergence - Sock Opera, Deal with a Devil, Demonic Possession, Episode: s02e04 Sock Opera, F/M, Harm to Animals, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Murder-Suicide, Possession, Resurrection, Triangle Bill Cipher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 06:10:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17544221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProblematicPines/pseuds/ProblematicPines
Summary: Once Pine Tree was dead, claiming Shooting Star as his own was small fry.





	Tell Her Later

Once Pine Tree was dead, claiming Shooting Star as his own was small fry. The main driving force behind the Mystery Twins  _(Bill still found himself chortling at such a puny and childish name)_  was out of the way, and with it, the biggest threat to his plans. Sure, Shooting Star was a formidable foe, but with her as his minion, Bill Cipher had nothing to fear. And the moment she tried objecting against his desires, Bill could just dispose of her as he had her beloved twin brother.

“Humans and their pointless sentimentality,” Bill remembered thinking when Shooting Star first broke down over Pine Tree’s death. “Don’t they see how much of a waste of time it is? Then again, time is an illusion so who am I to judge how these mortal meat-bags spend their measly lives.”

He had been watching her from the shadows of the bedroom she had once shared with her brother, but now it was empty, desolate, devoid of Dipper. He had been shrieking with jagged, insane laughter the whole time Shooting Star had bawled and howled in her bed, clutching Pine Tree’s blue cap to her chest. Nothing brought him more pleasure than seeing those he hated with every fibre of his being suffering, and Bill savoured every teardrop, every rasping sob, every quiver of her body.

Bill knew that the twins had names, though he found it more amusing to refer to them by their symbols on his zodiac wheel. It made him feel stronger somehow, like he was relegating them to mere iconography in some ancient cave drawing that he felt inspired by.

Dehumanization was something he did very well, as Pine Tree had came to understand.

 

Surprisingly he had yet to see the boy in the mindscape. His other vessel’s souls were trapped there with him after he disposed of their physical bodies too, though knew better than to temper Bill in his own plane of existence. Why Pine Tree hadn’t made an appearance yet was a question Bill could have easily solved, though watching his sister mourn the death of her brother through hysterical wailing and endless, endless sobbing was a much better use of his time.

Bill had debated on whether he should leave Shooting Star be. Not to give her a break; absolutely not. He wasn’t one to show mercy.

Pine Tree had realized that only a few seconds too soon when he was plummeting towards the ground, having been hurled over the railing of the water tower on the outskirts of town.

No, Bill had debated on leaving her alone because he wanted to see how long this could be dragged out for. How long Mabel would be howling at night and begging for Dipper to come back despite the impossibility of him walking through the door. How long it would take for her to snap and follow in his footsteps.

It hadn’t taken a genius to find out how and why Dipper had apparently committed suicide. But apparently, it did in this case.

Because not once did Mabel once accuse Bill of being the reason her brother was dead. Which, admittedly, was quite a surprise for Bill. In his eye, after all he had put the twins through, him being the reason Pine Tree was dead would have been at the top of Shooting Star’s list. Yet this small-minded waste of flesh was questioning why Dipper had apparently killed himself, even though the answer was as clear as day.

 

“Grief can cloud one’s mind,” were one of the messages that Bill scrawled into the wooden walls of the bedroom one night, using a fang of one of the many creatures that lurked the town of Gravity Falls. Just to add salt to the wound, he carved a jagged pine needle into the wood; hearing Shooting Star’s throat-searing howl of despair the following morning and seeing her double over in agony was worth it.

“We all lose loved ones,” was another message. This time, Bill had spelled it out with splintered branches and twigs he gathered from the forest, as well as the skulls of squirrels and even a few rabbit bones, all of which had been picked clean and bleached white. Mabel waking up to see the message organized on the ground outside of the Mystery Shack had been a thrilling sight: the way the blood rushed from her face and the way her throat gurgled and wheezed as she tried to force out a pleading cry for mercy.

“But it doesn’t have to be this way,” was the next message, this time being formed by the darkness itself. Bill had twisted and curled the shadows of the stinking, filthy bedroom to his whim, and had it spell out his latest condolences to Shooting Star in the air above her bed. This time, instead of shrieking out in despair, a brief look of hope flashed through her watery, reddened eyes.

Bill loved the glimmer in her. He could sense that she was holding onto any semblance of normalcy after what had happened, and seeing a potential route to reclaim what she once had was something she couldn’t just turn down.

 

Bill had decided that particular morning that he wouldn’t rest until Shooting Star was his.

 

There was a sense of cruel irony in it all, really; he killed one of the Mystery Twins, and recruited the other. He wished he had plotted this idea earlier; Pine Tree had the smarts of the two. But Shooting Star’s creativity was something he couldn’t pass up; maybe she could inspire him to torture in ways he hadn’t imagined before. And he had tortured somebody in pretty much every known way in all of the multiverse.

So Bill had went about his way of breaking down Shooting Star.

 

It hadn’t been hard; she was already vulnerable and depressed after losing the single most important person in her life, the one that had kept her anchored to reality. Losing this important figure was something that had opened up the floodgates.

Bill had tasted Mabel’s nightmares; he had floated above her while she lay in bed at night, squirming and whining in her sleep as he lapped up every last drop of essence that filled her mind with visions of Pine Tree. It tasted like acidic strawberries, and bile, and smelled like rotten meat and heavy, metallic blood. It was an addictive taste that Bill wanted to savour, but he needed to wear Mabel down if he wanted to have any chance of getting her to follow his every rule like an obedient little doll.

 

“You can get him back, you know” had been scrawled into Mabel’s flesh one night, light scratches in her stomach that faded after a few hours.

_“Who is this?”_

“You know me, Shooting Star,” had been haphazardly arranged with the shredded remains of Mabel’s shitty romance novels.

_“Bill?”_

“The one and only, dollface,” came the response, this time in the form of ancient-looking lettering cut deep into into the trunks of the trees just outside of the Mystery Shack.

 _“I don’t want to deal with you right now. Leave me alone.”_  
  
“Oh, but Shooting Star...I can offer you so much if you just hear me out,” Bill’s next message, this time being delivered by a large, inky-black bird-creature that shattered through the bedroom window and sent shards of glass flying in all directions, was practically dripping with promise and allure.

 _“I really don’t want you in my life right now. Just get away from me.”_  
  
“So you’d rather just leave Pine Tree to fend for himself?” Bill’s sadistic side couldn’t help but rear its ugly head in his next message, even if only a little; it had been delivered in the maggot-infested carcass of an opossum, a folded up scrap of parchment stuffed in its gaping stomach.

 _“You don’t get to speak about Dipper, you freak.”_  
  
“I guess not. Won’t stop me from resurrecting him though,” Bill replied, this time through messy hand-stitching one of Mabel’s favourite sweaters; the one with the big pink kitten face on front of it.

 _“Over my dead body.”_  
  
It had taken all of Bill’s willpower to not make a cruel joke about Dipper in his next response, but he still cackled and shrieked with manic laughter, which fell on Mabel’s deaf ears.

“That can be arranged,” the message said, this time being written in the blood of some four-eyed forest creature with tiny deer antlers and a bushy fox’s plume.

Bill knew that Mabel would give in sooner or later; her desire to see Dipper again overcame whatever deep-set hate she held for Bill. Apparently, her dead sibling meant more to her than he did, a loving and kind interdimensional being that only wanted what was best for her.

 

And Bill was right.

After a week of no interaction between the two of them (no gory messages being passed from him to her, no cryptic scrawls on walls or tabletops - Bill had even purposefully stayed away from the Shack just to build up the suspense of whether Shooting Star would take him up on his offer), Mabel responded.

 _“I want to see him again. Just once.”_  
  
Bill was victorious.

“You can see him for the rest of your life. If you so desire. But first you have to do something for me.” This message had been delivered via the demonic, rasping chanting emitting from a wild fox that Bill had purposefully possessed, just to freak out Mabel. But she was merely surprised by the appearance of the shaking, contorting animal at the foot of her bed, with its bulging yellow cat-eyes and lolling, salivating tongue.

 

The same night, Bill was waiting in a forest clearing. Ironically, the same one where that little pig-nosed child had summoned him a few weeks before to get into Stan Pines’ head for some code or what have you. He couldn’t care less about that chubby little pig now however; he had Shooting Star, the one and only. The Telepath was useful, but he was disposable. Shooting Star, however; he could mould her into any shape he desired, and he did very much want to.

The night was very cold for summer, and that was mostly due to Bill’s mere presence. He wasn’t really there, not physically, but his mere existence was enough to have some kind of effect on this plane of existence.

Mabel had emerged from the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. She was much more gaunt than she had been at the beginning of the summer; her brother’s death had certainly taken a toll on her. Bill would have felt sympathy for her, had he not...y’know...been the sole reason her brother was dead in the first place.

But of course he wasn’t going to tell her that. He wasn’t going to fall at the last hurdle.

He’ll tell her later.

Shooting Star stood in front of Bill; or rather, the coldest spot in the clearing. She apparently knew that he was levitating there by pure instinct, a creature of death and destruction, formed as a floating triangle with a bulging eye that glowed with a cruel and sadistic glee. He tipped his black hat with one sinewy, liquorice-twist arm, even though his newest pet couldn’t see him.

“Good evening, Shooting Star,” he sneered, his voice carried on the wind and whispering around Mabel in the form of dead leaves. She shivered in the cold, but wasn’t fazed. Bill liked that about her.

From ol’ Six-Fingers to Phoenix to Pine Tree and now finally Shooting Star…

Bill sure was proud of himself for absolutely totalling the Pines family.

“Let’s just get this over with.” Mabel stated in a deadpan tone. She sounded exhausted beyond all reason, but there was a steely undertone; there was nothing Bill could throw at her now that she wouldn’t take on. She had lost too much, and didn’t have enough left to lose. Without Pine Tree, her life was as good as over; was selling her soul to a dream demon all that drastic of a measure?

Taking interest in her no-nonsense attitude (which she seemed to have inherited from her late twin, it seemed), Bill held out a black, gnarled hand, and a plume of ethereal blue fire sparked to life. It was colder than he was, but snapped and flared like an inferno around his spindly black fingers.

“Do we have a deal, kid?”

Mabel stuck out her own hand, frail and trembling and scuffed with scratches and bruises from where she had punched herself and the walls of her bedroom in a vain attempt to relieve some of the soul-crushing pain she felt following Dipper’s death, and gripped hold of Bill’s hand. The blue fire snaked over her own hand and up her forearm, engulfing it in the shimmering blue aura.

They shook on it.

“Deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> Finally, a Gravity Falls Fic with actual supernatural elements! As much as I love this show, it took me three months since starting to write a story for the show that focuses on what made the show so great in the first place, that being its paranormal mysteries! Though this isn't a mystery really, it still stands to reason.
> 
> Also, my first Fic involving Bill Cipher! This has been a long time coming!
> 
> This story is based on what I believe happened if Bill had indeed ended up killing Dipper at the end of "Sock Opera" (as referenced by his apparent suicide note in the Stanmobile, addressed to Mabel). Mabel is so overcome with grief after losing her brother to what she believes is suicide that she will literally sell her soul to Bill just so that she can have a hope of seeing her brother again.  
> I intentionally left this as an open-ended story.
> 
> Did Bill really want Mabel's soul in exchange for seeing Dipper again, or was that the start of a long and slippery slope?  
> Did Bill ever end up confessing that he was the reason Dipper was dead?  
> Will this have a follow-up?
> 
> So many questions, but not enough time!
> 
> Please leave comments and kudos, as they are very much appreciated! Thank you for reading to the end!


End file.
